85
After visiting Sandy, Tony drove Annie to a Camden back street. They went up to a sixties block of flats via a series of metal walkways and arrived at the second floor, stopping when they came to a door with purple paint peeling off it in strips. There were claw marks at the bottom of the door. They both looked at it and thought cat owner.
Annie knocked.
Seconds later, a young man with a high-coloured face, blond hair and baby-blue eyes came to answer it, clutching a large green-eyed ginger tom.
‘Oh!’ he said, looking at the pair of them.
‘Pete? Pete Jones? Do you remember me?’ asked Annie.
‘Mrs Carter! Oh God, yes. Sorry. Yes. Of course it’s you.’
‘Sorry to bother you on your day off…’ she started.
‘No! Not at all. Come in, come in, sorry about the mess…’ and Pete Jones, bar manager of the Palermo, stepped back, let them come in, hastily depositing the cat outside on the landing. ‘That’s Benj,’ said Pete. ‘Never get a cat. They’re adorable but they rip everything to shreds. Come in, sit down.’
It was neat inside the flat, and pristine-clean. Annie and Tony sat on a ruby-red fabric sofa and Pete sat down opposite in an armchair, looking flushed and flustered.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ he said. ‘Tea, coffee? Anything?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Pete’s anxious eyes rested on Annie’s face. ‘God, this must be so hard on you, so awful. This whole thing with Dolly. I’m so sorry.’
‘You found her,’ said Annie.
‘I did. Yes.’ Pete made a flapping motion with his hand in front of his eyes, which suddenly reddened. ‘Sorry, sorry. I keep thinking about it, and every time I do, it’s just… it’s just so upsetting.’
Annie stared at him in sympathy, thinking he’d had a terrible shock and he didn’t seem like the toughest of types, either. It must have knocked him sideways, finding Dolly like that.
‘Can you talk about it?’ she asked. ‘I know it’s difficult for you, but if there’s anything you know, anything you can tell us that might help catch whoever did this, it would be good.’
‘I know. The police have been round and asked me all about it again, but what can I say?’ Pete swiped a tear away from his eye and shook his head. ‘It was horrible. She usually opens the front entrance before eleven, to let in the bar staff and the cleaners, and I’m always first on the doorstep – we always used to laugh about that. I’m a punctuality freak. So there I was, it was a quarter to eleven, and the doors were still locked.’
‘And that was really unusual,’ said Tony.
‘Yes. Very. I rapped, but there was no reply, so I used the key she’d given me for emergencies and let myself in.’
‘What then?’ asked Annie.
‘God, it was awful. Awful,’ said Pete, and had to stifle a sob.
There was a loud scratching noise from outside the door.
‘That’s just Benj,’ Pete said with a faint, tearful laugh. ‘He’s ruined that fucking door, the little bastard.’
‘Go on with what you were saying,’ said Tony.
‘There’s not much more to say. I let myself in, I went up the stairs and called out to her, asked if she was OK, but there was no answer.’
‘So you went in,’ said Annie.
Pete just nodded, lips compressed, fighting back more tears.
‘Then,’ he said, sighing, trying to compose himself. He passed a hand over his face, and Annie saw that his nails were bitten down to the quick. ‘I tried the handle and it was unlocked. So I went in. And I found her.’ Pete’s face crumpled again as the tears flowed. ‘She was dead,’ he managed to say, and then he just sobbed his heart out.
86
Redmond Delaney was always interested in Annie Carter. He’d had Mitchell watch her when she came back to England, and she did that quite frequently. She was a pet project of his; he liked to think of her as a butterfly trapped under glass so that he could watch her at his leisure.
Redmond was very curious about her trips north of the border. What was so fascinating to her up there? And he wondered – given that she’d been married to the Mafia bastard at one point – if she had known about Constantine Barolli’s plan to kill both him and his sister back in the seventies.
He was irritated that Gary Tooley hadn’t come up with the goods yet on this next big secret. Him and Mitchell had gone to the Blue Parrot to get the information and pay the five thousand (Redmond wasn’t sure if he was going to pay Gary or cut him yet; the cunt had seriously annoyed him), but guess what? Gary was suddenly out of town. This made Redmond think that Gary was just tweaking his tail, upping the ante.
That prick.
‘He’s back again,’ said Mitchell.
‘What?’ Redmond was sitting in his living room, and Mitchell was standing at the window, nudging aside the closed curtains. It was night-time.
‘The dirty little creep in the crappy car. Annie Carter’s follower,’ said Mitchell. He glanced at Redmond. ‘Now your follower too, it seems. He’s parked up outside, watching the house again.’
Redmond stood up, went over to the window and looked out. There was a car there. Inside, dimly, a match flared as Jackie Tulliver lit a cigar.
Redmond ground his teeth in annoyance. The Tooley business was irritating enough, and now this. His years spent as an East End Face had made him anxious about people tailing him, tracking him, following him. He was the last Delaney standing and there was a reason for that; he was the toughest, the smartest, the fastest to react. Much as he admired Annie Carter, he was not so keen on this lapdog scruffy cunt of hers watching his house.
He’d done a little watching of his own, though; he knew Annie was back in her Holland Park house, and Mitchell had seen her talking in the street with the man out there in the car.
‘Jackie Tulliver,’ Redmond told Mitchell. He’d recognized him from years back as a Carter boy. ‘He’s working for her.’
That night, Redmond lashed himself with the whip again, because he was having thoughts, impure thoughts. Nothing new there. Really, they’d done him a favour, kicking him out of the priesthood, he just wasn’t suited to it. He thought of all those lovely parishioners and got quite excited, quite agitated. And then he whipped himself harder, and got angry at the thought of those Carter people, Tooley and Tulliver, arsing him about. And mixed up in it, as usual, was Annie Carter, fabulous and unflinching as she strode about creating mayhem.
Panting, naked to the waist, he put the whip back in its box and went to his bedroom window and looked out. And there he was, that little fecker Jackie Tulliver, sitting in his car smoking oversized cigars and having the brass neck to be watching him, Redmond Delaney.
Redmond wasn’t happy.
He wasn’t happy at all.
He snatched up his shirt and dragged it on, glorying in the stinging pain as the cuts on his back stuck to the fine material. He wasn’t having this. He was going out there, right now.
87
Max was back again that night. Annie woke up, switched on the light, and there he was, in the same chair, looking at her. Her heart leapt. After last time, she’d been sure that was it: finished. But he was here. He was back.
‘Do you ever set that bloody alarm?’ he asked when she pulled herself into a sitting position and tucked the covers up to her chin.
‘Sometimes,’ she said.
‘But not right now.’
‘Got it.’
‘Because you’re expecting me.’
Yes, she had hoped – prayed, even – that Max would come back tonight. She had doubted it; but here he was. She’d had a tiring, stressful day, visiting Sandy and then Pete Jones; then she’d phoned Hunter with the news that the train driver involved in Dolly’s father’s accident all those years ago was dead.